this post brought to you by Malcolm Gladwell and his cool ideas

I have no intention of doing a review here - I just want to share some passages from this ueber-cool book Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking that I read a couple weeks ago. I've always respected fast decision making that relies on the subconscious, and this book made that respect make sense. Really good read.

"We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it."

"Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it's fallible. It's not the case that our internal commmputer always shihnes through, instantly decoding the 'truth' of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled."

Thin-slicing: the "ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience." Example: marriage expert John Gottman - if he "analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for 15 minutes, his success rate is around 90%"....and recently he discovered that if he looked at only 3 minutes of a couple talking, the accuracy of his predictions still remained very impressive. How did he do it? He knew to focus on four particular negative emotions: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

"Spontaneity isn't random...how good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-sress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal."

"The act of describing a face has the effect of impairing your otherwise effortless ability to subsequently recognize that face."

Sometimes, "all that extra information isn't actually an advantage at all; in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon." And sometimes, "that extra information is more than useless. It's harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks," for instance, "is that they take too much information into account."

If you do something that puzzles a child, the "child would immediately look up into your eyes. Why? Because what you have done requires explanation, and the child knows that she can find an answer on your face. This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing. It is picking up on subtle, fleeting cues in order to read someone's mind."

"We take it as a given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may - or may not - express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What research showed, though is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings; it is an equal partner in the emotional process."

"We have come to confuse information with understanding....The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former; we are desperately lacking in the latter."